Video Games Live

On Sunday night I went to see VideoGamesLive, a concert where a live orchestra is playing music from video games. I’ve been wanting to go for a long time, ever since Roxy and Mike told me about it in early 2007. I had tickets for last year’s performance, but I got sick the day before and I was in no condition to go. I had to wait another year and a half for them to come back to NYC, so I got tickets as soon as I could, over 6 months ago.

We ended up going a large group – 12 people. I enjoyed the concert – the crowd, not so much – but I wish they’d played some favorites of mine (that I missed last year) like Civilization or God of War. Still, I have to say I discovered new beautiful music like the theme from Chrono Cross (here’s live in the second half of this video) or the Halo suite.

Other highlights were a pianist who could play blindfolded most of the themes form classic videogames (Mario, Zelda, and the like) and a Guitar Hero performance (on Expert), played on the big screen. Also, during the play of One Winged Angel (the boss fight theme from Final Fantasy VII) they had a nice montage of cosplay.

You can find my pictures in this SmugMug gallery. There’s a ton of videos on YouTube of the event (i.e. this one: part1, part2). For more info, here’s the NY Times coverage of the event.

Now I go back to replay for the hundredth time the Chrono Cross theme, acoustic version.